Press Releases

Sydney – October 23, 2007 – Altium Limited, the electronics design industry’s leading developer of unified electronic product development solutions, has announced support in Altium Designer for the LatticeSC and LatticeSCM (collectively, the LatticeSC/M) families of high-performance FPGA devices.

Altium Designer lets electronics designers take a new approach to system design by bringing together hardware, software and programmable hardware development within a unified environment that allows all aspects of an electronic product to be designed and managed within a single system. This, combined with modern design data management capabilities and a single interface that is easy to use lets electronics designers breach the limitations and constraints of traditional tool boundaries.

This unified design approach reduces the time taken to bring products to market. It helps remove the barriers often found within design teams trying to design a single product using multiple toolsets. And unified design also extends the skills of both embedded and boardlevel designers, by making it easy to move the functionality of designs into software and programming FPGAs to run the application. This helps build and protect intellectual property in the ‘soft domain’ instead of in hardware, which is easily copied.

The LatticeSC/M families are the latest FPGAs in the growing list of devices, from all major vendors, that can be programmed using Altium Designer. Developers using the Altium Designer environment can now target designs for LatticeSC/M devices with full synthesis support. The extensive range of pre-synthesized, ready-to-use FPGA-based components that come standard with Altium Designer, including high-level processor and peripheral cores, can be used to develop complete systems on the high-performance LatticeSC/M FPGAs. The unified Altium Designer system also supports the development of systems right through to board design and production within the same environment.

Electronics designers can easily target any supported device during development, eliminating the need to change development platforms or purchase additional software and specific device support modules.

Altium Designer’s unified design environment also allows designers to retarget the programmable elements of a design to a range of different processor platforms, both FPGA-hosted and discrete, during development without significant software or hardware rework. This means that crucial application architecture decisions can remain open until much later in the development cycle than is currently possible.

LatticeSC/SCM-based daughter boards for Altium’s Desktop NanoBoard reconfigurable hardware platform are currently in development. The Desktop NanoBoard provides a vendor-neutral development platform that features plug-in FPGA daughter boards to house the target devices, as well as interchangeable peripheral boards.

Nick Martin, CEO of Altium, commented, “By unlocking the potential of FPGAs with our Altium Designer software, we are challenging electronics designers to consider new ways
to design electronic products, and to extend their existing skills into new areas. We see this unified approach to electronics design – embracing hardware, software and programmable hardware – as the future of electronics product design.”

Martin continued, “The addition of support for these Lattice devices keeps our customers up-to-date with the latest device technology. Designers using the LatticeSC/M FPGAs will be able to exploit the advantages of unified design and easily make use of the devices to accelerate their application development within Altium Designer.“

Pricing and availability
Support for the LatticeSC/M family will be available to all Altium Designer 6 license holders in the next update. Altium Designer 6 is available for immediate purchase through Altium’s sales and support centres worldwide. For information on pricing, customers should contact their local Altium sales and support center. Details can be found at www.altium.com/contact-us

ENDS

About Altium
Altium Limited (ASX:ALU) is the leading developer of electronic product development solutions dedicated to unifying the different design disciplines involved in electronics product development. Altium products ensure all electronic engineers, designers, developers, and their organizations, take maximum advantage of emerging design technologies to bring smarter products to market faster and easier. Founded in 1985, Altium has headquarters in Sydney, Australia, sales offices in the United States, Europe, Japan, China, and resellers in all other major markets. For more information, please visit www.altium.com

About Altium’s Desktop NanoBoard
The Desktop NanoBoard is the latest member of Altium’s family of reconfigurable hardware development platforms, the first in the industry. It allows quick, interactive implementation and debugging of electronics designs. The Desktop NanoBoard has been specially designed to take full advantage of Altium Designer’s unified electronic product development system. Together they combine to transform engineers’ desktops into a complete, interactive electronics product development laboratory. Altium's NanoBoard architecture features alternative plug-in FPGA daughter boards, and interchangeable plugin peripheral boards. Engineers can easily retarget designs to different programmable devices without changing the actual design.

About Altium Designer
Altium Designer is the electronics design industry’s only electronics product development system that removes the barriers imposed by disparate design flows and unifies the different design disciplines involved in electronics product development – the design of the hardware, the programmable hardware and the embedded software. Altium Designer’s unified design environment means users can harness the potential of the latest electronics technologies, and move to a ‘soft’ design methodology without the need to acquire specialist programmable device expertise. This provides companies with increased design flexibility, reduced production costs and quickens time to market. Altium Designer also delivers the freedom to move between any device, from any vendor, at any time. It lowers total cost of ownership by eliminating the need to integrate extra devices at extra cost to increase functionality, or to create a complete solution. For more information, please visithttp://www.altium.com/altium-designer/overview

About Lattice Semiconductor
Lattice Semiconductor Corporation provides the industry’s broadest range of Programmable Logic Devices (PLD), including Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA), Complex Programmable Logic Devices (CPLD), Mixed-Signal Power Management and Clock Generation Devices, and industry-leading SERDES products. Lattice continues to deliver “More of the Best” to its customers with comprehensive solutions for system design, including an unequaled portfolio of high-performance, non-volatile and low-cost FPGAs. Lattice products are sold worldwide through an extensive network of independent sales representatives and distributors, primarily to OEM customers in communications, computing, industrial, consumer, automotive, medical and military end markets. For more information, visit http://www.latticesemi.com

Altium, Altium Designer, LiveDesign, and their respective logos are trademarks or registered trademarks of Altium Limited or its subsidiaries. All other registered or unregistered trademarks referenced herein are the property of their respective owners, and no trademark rights to the same are claimed.